


Comforting the Disturbed.

by VictoryCandescence



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Art, Art History, Brooklyn Boys, M/M, Melancholy, Mutual Pining, New York City, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 09:42:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16365467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoryCandescence/pseuds/VictoryCandescence
Summary: Bucky goes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.





	Comforting the Disturbed.

* * *

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

— Cesar A. Cruz

* * *

 

The Met still looks the same from the outside, more or less. Bucky likes the places that still look familiar, because so little is to him these days. He likes the Bridge, the Bowery, the Park. Coney Island is brighter and flashier but still just as dirty, still just a little seedier than the tourists expect it to be. Everything’s different, but if he looks hard enough or from the right angles, he can find the familiar even in this city that is perpetually building atop the ruins.

It used to be free to get into the Met, which was always great back in the day. They’d make the trek uptown and he’d get to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon watching Steve sketch the Greek and Roman statues from different angles, sometimes concentrating on the drape of stone fabric or the curve of a nose or the flow of a gesture frozen in marble.

Admission is pay-as-you-wish now, so he gives two dollars. Money doesn’t go as far anymore, he knows, and he’d feel strange giving any less. He already feels like he doesn’t belong here. Doesn’t belong anywhere, really.

It’s different inside. More open, brighter. Crowded. The crowds make him skittish sometimes, but other times he’s glad for them. It’s easier to disappear when there’s lots of people around. Easier to be alone.

He walks around aimlessly for about an hour or so. He happens upon a new section, [a bright rotunda](https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/the-robert-lehman-collection), and goes down the stairs to stand in it. There’s a gallery set inside, and the rooms are dim and quiet. When the kinetic movement of the crowd in the main hall starts getting to him, he ducks in here. _Private Collection_ , he reads from a placard. The space is smaller than the upper floors, the rooms set up as if he’s walking inside someone’s living room. There’s some spindly furniture, and a lot of little round pots and boxes and things with intricate designs carved or painted on them. The paintings here are dark and delicate, round faces and pale skin in swirls of foliage or fabric. His footsteps are muffled by carpeting, and the air smells of dust. So he’s surprised when he rounds a corner and finds another person, though not enough to have startled himself too badly.

She’s older, short and thin with a frisson of greying dark hair cropped close to her head. She’s wearing all black except for the brightly patterned scarf wound about her neck, and the rainbow gauntlet of thick bangle bracelets on either arm. Not a threat. She turns away from the painting she’s examining and blinks at him from a pair of round-framed glasses.

She tilts her head at the painting, inviting him to look with her. Bucky steps forward and stands at her shoulder.

It’s Renaissance, he thinks. Sometime around then. [It’s a nude figure of a woman and a fat little cherub to her right.](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/459077) He’s holding what looks like a honeycomb, dotted with bees and looking slightly dazed. She looks completely unconcerned at his predicament. Instead her eyes are focused outward at the viewer, the sheer veil she’s pinching between her fingers doing nothing to hide herself. In the upper corner is a verse written in a language Bucky (surprisingly) doesn’t understand.

“Do you want to know what it says?” the woman asks. Bucky nods.

“ _‘While little Cupid stole from a beehive a honeycomb, a bee stung the thief’s finger. Such is the short-lived lust we strive for: harmful and mixed with sad sorrow.’_ ”

“That’ll teach him,” Bucky says, and is gratified when the woman laughs.

“I don’t think so. He’s Cupid, one taste of honey will never be enough. So damn the bees. Besides, here is Venus to prove the point – she knows you’re looking at her, see? And each time you look, she looks back. The eyes can’t resist the temptation of beauty, even if they risk being caught out for it.” She sighs, though she’s clearly amused. “Nothing ever really changes, does it?”

Bucky smirks, gives her a sidelong look. “No ma’am, I suppose it doesn’t.”

“Human nature!” she says, twirling her hands about in front of her, as if embracing and dismissing the entire ridiculous concept at once. Bucky’s smile goes wider, and he surprises himself further by giving her a wink. She smiles back and leaves the room, going on to the next gallery and leaving him be.

Bucky examines the painting a little longer. There’s a lot to see. Venus looks right back. He finds he doesn’t mind much. He hopes she doesn’t either.

When he feels a little more at ease, Bucky wanders back out. He passes through the main hall, up the stairs and through the sculpture atrium. These are the statues he remembers. He thinks for a moment, maybe a little hysterically, that they should be real – just people frozen in time like he was, like Steve was. He could ask them if they remembered him, ask how much things have changed, if it was any easier to take if you were able to witness it all happening.

A few of them are rougher than the others, rendered in something dark and shiny rather than smooth white marble. _Auguste Rodin_ , he reads, and hears the name in his head in Steve’s voice. Bucky slows to a stop in front of a life-size female figure. She’s not posed like any of the others; no heroic up-tilted stance, no relaxed _contraposto_ ; instead she’s hunched over, arms shielding her face and breasts in shame, knees about to give out.

_[Eve](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/191804)_ , he reads on the tiny placard.

Something wells up inside his chest. She’s not real, not a person that ever was, but Bucky knows this feeling. He knows what it feels like to be cast out, changed forever and unable to go back. What it feels like to want to hide your face from everything and sink into the ground.

To feel all that and yet keep moving, because there is no way but forward anymore.  

His hand twitches toward the statue. He knows he’s not allowed to touch it, and besides that he’s not close enough to anyway. But he wants to. Not sure why.

He goes up a few flights and finds himself in another new wing. The architecture here is clean and un-fussy, a stark departure from the historic ornamentation winding through the rest of the building. The paintings here are also much different. Splashes of color, asymmetry, indefinable squiggles and blobs. [One canvas is just painted solid blue](https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/yves-klein-1928-1962-untitled-blue-monochrome-ikb-6100724-details.aspx), and Bucky almost busts a gut trying not to laugh and draw the attention of other patrons, or the guard strolling from room to room. He remembers once when they came here, there was a painting by a guy with a French name. _M_ -something. Steve was brimming over to get to see it in person, but Bucky just stared, eyebrows hooked together in confusion.

“[This looks like kids stuff](https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=matisse),” he said in a loud whisper. Steve gave him a dirty look and shushed him. “I’m serious,” he continued anyway. “You can paint better than him. This is what your paintings used to look like when we were kids, for Pete’s sake. Hell, even _I_ could do that!”

Steve looked away from the painting and up into his face, spark in his eyes like he usually had right before a confrontation.

“Yeah, maybe,” Steve had said. “But you didn’t.”

“But I –” Then Bucky stopped, realizing what Steve meant. “Oh. Well then. If _that’s_ all it takes.”

Steve grinned like he just landed a knockout punch.

And honestly, it kind of was. Even since they were kids, Steve had a way of making Bucky see things differently, to never take things at face value. Now, [looking at a canvas that seems like just a bunch of blobs and streaks](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/488916?searchField=All&;sortBy=relevance&;deptids=21&;when=A.D.+1900-present&;ft=easter+monday&;offset=0&;rpp=20&;pos=1), he thinks not about how easy or difficult it was to make, but what kind of feelings the artist must’ve been having when he was working on it – and what kind of things it makes him feel. His brain keeps trying to make sense of it all, but there really isn’t any rhyme or reason. Still, it’s kind of pleasing to get lost in the shapes, pick out the colors and notice tiny details, like bits of newspaper print stuck forever beneath the layer of varnish. Whether it was meant to be there or not, Bucky’ll never know. And he realizes it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s there now, forever, documented in this museum for better or worse.

Oh, he thinks. _Oh_.

In the next room he goes into, two young men are examining a painting. One is pale and slight, dressed in tight jeans and an artfully destroyed sweater, the other in boots and a leather jacket. He has a carefully trimmed beard, and one side of his head is shaved, revealing an intricate tattoo that curls up from his neck.

“I’ve always liked this one,” Bucky hears the tattooed kid say to his companion. “Makes me feel uncomfortable, but in the good way, the kind of way you should feel when you get too complacent, you know?”

The pale kid bites his lip, nods a little. “Actually, yeah, I think I do.” They look a little longer, then he slips his hand in the back pocket of the tattooed kid’s jeans, and they move on to look at another piece. They lean easy into each other, like they’ve been fitted at each others’ side for a long time. They look pretty comfortable to him.

When they walk on to the next room, Bucky sidles up to [the painting](https://www.reddit.com/r/museum/comments/5hbml9/philip_guston_stationary_figure_1973/).

Immediately he begins to feel uneasy as his eyes pick over the shapes and lines. The figure looks almost cartoonish, but even so it looks like a body strapped down, tied tight with red ropes, discordant shapes hanging over the prone form, a cigarette in its mouth like he’s a moment from execution. He shivers a little and steps back, walking on, trying to shift his attention to a painting across from it that feels softer,[ like hazy grey waterfalls of dripped paint](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/497082). But he keeps sneaking glances at the other painting, the one that discomforts him. He reminds himself it holds no power over him; only the emotions it invokes do. And they’re his to feel.

No one’s gonna strap him down anymore.

Time to find another quiet place, he thinks.

Back up on the second floor, he gets turned around and finds himself wandering down a deceptively plain-looking corridor until he comes across a stone-pillared entrance to [a Chinese-style garden](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/78870). It’s unexpected and entirely curious; it looks like it was sliced at random from a natural elsewhere and fitted into this white-walled room. Bucky walks down the small sloping ramp. There are clumps of people here and there, but the room is open and bright, and there’s even a little pond of water splashing quietly along the edge of the room. The floor is paved in stone, and pointed pagodas extend from the walls. Bucky walks beneath the shelter of the roof and feels transported momentarily – but in a wholly fantastic way, like a daydream, not like any of his intrusive trauma-laden memories.

He realizes it’s been a long time since he let himself daydream. He thinks it might have been something he used to do a lot, before. Maybe there’s something to that. He feels...good. Calm.

Ready to soldier on.

Along the side hall, there are gallery rooms dipping off the main run. The works here are small, hung up on the grey-painted wall, then covered over with protective glass boxes.

He’s been avoiding it, he knows. Because this is really what he’d come here to see.

One smallish room has a wall on which there is a stark square of black text. He stops just outside and reads it from where he stands.

_Creation in the Time of War: Art from the Front Lines of WWII_.

He takes a deep breath, walks in.

There are only three other people in the room: One old man, sitting on the lone bench in the middle of the room, listening to the Audio Guide and two young women, about college-age, clutching notebooks and whispering back and forth to each other as they point out different things in the pieces they’re examining, stopping every now and again to jot them down.

Bucky starts at the first piece. It’s a photograph of two men in uniform, asleep in a trench – but it doesn’t look like the normal sort of journalistic photo one would expect. It’s obviously framed deliberately, to draw focus to the way the men are mirrors of each other in posture, the way their bodies curve around each other though they do not touch, like they’re two pieces of a puzzle that haven’t been fitted together. There are a few others by the same person – which Bucky finds out was actually a woman, a British field nurse on the front lines. The ones that he finds himself staring the longest at are the ones she’s taken of the bombed-out ruins of people’s homes. Items still arranged on shelves with care, though soaked through with rain and littered with debris from a caved-in roof. A living room, couch and chair and table and lamp all still standing though two walls out of four have crumbled around, leaving the room looking eerily like a movie set or a life-sized dollhouse. Clothes still hanging in a wardrobe half burnt away by fire.

The next artist was a chaplain, who the plaque explains had only one pad of paper to last him the length of his entire service, and he filled every single sheet except one with exceptionally delicate watercolors – trees, hands, a line of men marching down a dirt road, a dilapidated church. The missing sheet, it was said, was used to write a letter home to his mother and little sister. The actual letter isn’t displayed there, but there is a small photograph of a woman holding it – presumably the little sister, telling by her age. It still has the jagged perforation at the top, where it was torn from the spiral binding.

There are silly things included too – not every artist was particularly talented or classically trained. Some cartoons on water-stained postcards, some naughty drawings on scrap paper, one photograph of a proud-looking kid with a tilted helmet standing next to a surprisingly detailed tower made of ammo boxes and wood planks. Bucky remembers the downtime, the hurry-up-and-wait that was the hallmark of his time in the service, when they’d kill time with cards or stories or sleep, when he’d check and re-check his rifle and Steve would pull out one of his notebooks and –

These are Steve’s notebooks.

Well, the pages from them, at least. They had been un-bound and carefully pinned up, displayed beneath those protective glass boxes. Pages and pages of carefully pencilled lines. One whole wall dedicated to him. In the corner is another placard – just like every other placard. Bucky feels the tug of a smile. Steve must’ve insisted he not get any special treatment. Hell, they probably wanted to give him an exhibition of his own and he probably outright refused to be singled out. Probably still felt like a heel taking up a whole wall in this small, out-of-the-way room, knowing him. Bucky leans down to read the placard. 

> _Cpt. Steven Grant Rogers - “Captain America”_
> 
> _(American, b. 1918)_
> 
> _Medium: Moleskine notebook, graphite pencil, ink._
> 
> _Date: 1943 - 1945_
> 
> _Rogers, a working illustrator before the war, carried his talent with him to the front lines. Though responsible for his own special operations unit, the Howling Commandos, he always made time to capture the trappings of his day-to-day life, as well as the memories of Brooklyn back home, in careful and often extraordinarily accurate detail._
> 
> _Gift of the artist to the permanent collection, 2013_

Bucky stands back up and looks.

There is a double-page spread of their street. Garbage cans, laundry lines, leaky fireplug, spindly power lines. The pothole near the corner where the cobbles sunk down that always became a lake when it rained. The fire escape, the bent ladder, the curl of the rusty wrought-iron. The curtains in the windows of Mrs. Bidwell’s apartment, the water tower on top of the building where Aaron Grady lived, the gate in front of Mary Lismore’s stoop that was always swung wide open. Bucky remembers watching him draw this one, over the course of a few days trekking through French countryside, telling him what to include and watching the picture grow more detailed with every line and shade he added.

That street doesn’t look like that anymore.

Next to it are drawings of other places; long grass in front of an abandoned cottage, a fat old cat sleeping on a barrel outside a shuttered shoe shop, a flight of stone stairs beneath an archway at the end of a narrow street. None of these places were home, but Bucky remembers them suddenly, filling in the space around where the delicate grey lines ended.

There are pages with a few little drawings on each one. These are less detailed, studies and doodles – a jaunty little cartoon of Colonel Phillips throwing grenades at a cartoon of Steve, wearing an exaggerated frown and using the shield as an umbrella, grenades bouncing off it, dotted lines showing their trajectory. Phillips has a word bubble filled with lots of little scratchy symbols and things, and Steve has an exclamation point and a few large sweat drops flying out from his head. This could have been drawn any number of times Phillips had found a way to telephone and chew Steve out over the line for successfully completing a mission by disobeying the rules.

The first real face he recognizes is Dum Dum’s. That damn hat, that bush of a moustache, the teeth of a big grin beneath it – how could he not? It looks more like him than a photograph, even as exaggerated as it is. There are other faces too, other familiar bodies and poses: Gabe and Dernier hunched together – Bucky could almost hear the lilting French, the rumble of Gabe’s laugh, the staccato of Dernier’s. Morita fiddling with a box full of wires, face a study of concentration. Monty with his beret over his eyes, reclined against a tree, his rifle propped next to him, hands folded politely atop his stomach.

Bucky’s eyes come to rest on a pair of hands, wrapped around a rifle. Dirty nails, scabby knuckles, wrinkled sleeves. All that imperfection rendered with such care in soft grey lines. His eyes flick up a bit more, and then he is looking through the glass at his own face.

Or what used to be his face.

Waves of dark hair, crinkled eyes, crooked smile.

There’s him sitting and fussing with a knot in his bootstrings, him laid out along the ground with one leg hitched up during target practice, him chewing on his thumbnail reading a magazine, hair a mess, the light coming from behind him. There are more drawings of him than any other person, and even where his face isn’t present, Bucky can recognize pieces of himself too. A hand here, an eye there, the slope of a jaw, the posture of an unfinished figure.

A few more people enter the room, and Bucky overhears them say something about “Cap.” He’s been standing and staring at the wall of drawings for a solid twenty minutes at this point, letting the few single people that had been making their way around the room just flow around him. But he’s overwhelmed now, his heart beating hard inside him, and he needs to step away. He staggers over to the bench and sits down heavily, bringing his fingers – gloved and not – up to cover his mouth, letting his long hair fall in front of his face.

He doesn’t worry about being recognized. Just like everything else captured in those drawings, he doesn’t exist anymore. He tries to concentrate on breathing, on slowing his pulse. He fixes his eyes on the few more drawings and photos across from him, but his eyes slide off them like oil, and he finds himself staring blurrily at the spot where the floor meets the wall.

“You a vet, son?”

Bucky starts. The man who had been listening to the Audio Guide is talking to him, headphones hanging around his neck. He’s got a wizened brown face, no hair except a few wispy white tufts near his ears and around the back of his head. He smells sharply of aftershave.

Bucky nods, and the old man nods back in recognition. Bucky is thankful that he doesn’t seem to be getting ready to ask any more questions, or worse, thank him for his service. Then the man gestures to one of the drawings.

“My brother made that,” he said. Bucky leans forward. It’s an inky drawing of a girl sitting on a fence, and a dog jumping up to paw at her knees. Her hair is blowing in the breeze, and the grass in the field behind her follows it. It’s not as technically skillful as Steve’s or some of the other pieces, but it captures the moment perfectly – Bucky can tell that wherever it was, whenever it happened, the man who drew it really wanted it to be kept, and he succeeded.

“It’s very nice,” Bucky says. “I like it. Feels...happy.”

The man smiles, as if Bucky’s assessment was far more eloquent. “Thank you. He’d be flattered you thought so.” The man looks back at it. “Quincy was going to be a bank teller. Bet he never thought in a million years he’d have a drawing hanging in a museum! Just a hobby, you know? Eh – things get old enough, they’re worth more than they ever would’ve been.” The man chuckles. “I bet you’re thinkin’ I must be worth a fortune!”

Bucky smirks a bit. “Ah, you’re not that old,” he says.

“I’ll be 86 this December!” It sounds half like a brag and half a lament. “Quincy would’ve been 95 this year if he’d come home, and don’t think he wouldn’t have been stubborn enough to see it.”

“I’m sorry he didn’t,” Bucky says.

“We all were,” the old man says. “But he died fighting for this.” The man gestures around at the room, all the people, encompassing the whole museum. “Wasn’t in vain.”

_Bucky remembers the day after he’d got his letter. The cold silence that filled their apartment, the weight of the 4F stamp Steve had gotten heavy over everything, Bucky sitting outside the hardly-ever-closed bedroom door, head back against the wood._

_“Please, Stevie,” he’d said. “I’ll be fighting for you, for what you do, all the beautiful things you make. That’s the whole point, ain’t it? That’s what you’re always saying! Don’t be mad. You_ gotta _stay here so’s I got something to fight for.”_

“That’s a good way to think about it,” Bucky tells him.

“Only way you can,” the man says, getting up slowly from the bench. He offers Bucky his hand to shake, and Bucky surprises himself by taking it.

The only thing Bucky ever fought for was Steve. War was pointless, terrible business fueled by greed and ill ideology. Inevitable and insolvable like an epidemic that festered and broke anew in every generation. War was around him when he was young, pressing him into shape like clay. Now it was inside him pushing out, trying to crack him at the seams.

Steve was all he ever wanted to fight for. Even now.

 

\---

 

Bucky walks through Prospect Park the next day. It’s sunny, but fall is coming, and the air carries a bite of briskness. He worms his hands deeper into his pockets and keeps walking until he reaches a picnic area. At one of the empty picnic tables Steve is sat drawing, glancing up every now and then at the rolling hill and the trees, the buildings beyond.

He’s hunched over, leaning on his hand, pencil scratching away. He’s wearing a sweatshirt that’s slightly too large for him and a baseball cap. People pass him by without another glance.

Bucky walks over, takes a seat on the far end of the picnic bench, facing the opposite way, his back to the table. It takes a moment for Steve to notice someone else is sitting there; one more moment before he realizes who. Bucky knows it when he hears the scritching stop.

“Hi,” Steve says. It’s breathless and uncertain, just like every other time he’s popped up on Steve unawares. Bucky glances at him sideways. Steve’s eyes are wide and bright, his lips parted just slightly.

“Hey,” Bucky says. He hates that it has to be this way, but he knows he isn’t to the point where he can be around Steve on the regular and not fall apart. Steve’s already seen the horrible fallout of what’s been done to him. It wouldn’t be fair for him to have to witness Bucky claw his way back into a functional, healthy mindspace – or slide back into the darkness if he can’t make it there. No matter how much he wants to help, Bucky knows his guilt would just make it that much harder on both of them.

He keeps the word _someday_ tucked inside his heart.

But whenever it is, it’s not today, or anywhere near. So for now this is the next best thing. He gets to see Steve and Steve can see him, know that he’s trying, know that he’s still okay, or at least trying to be.

“Saw your drawings,” Bucky says, “in the museum.”

Steve’s mouth opens a little more before he closes it again.

“Y-you did?”

“I did.”

Steve looks away, fiddles with his pencil. “What’d you think?”

“I seen better,” he says, and grins a little at the way Steve’s head snaps back up, his lip pouted in surprise. “Not your fault. You had some pretty lousy models. That one kid, kinda looks like me? What a bum.”

Steve looks back down again, but he’s smiling now, even though he’s trying not to.

“Well, you know I _was_ always good at finding the beauty in all that ugliness.”

They smile, not quite at each other. Bucky bites his lips, Steve taps his pencil on his knuckles.

“Really, though,” Bucky says after a few moments of comfortable silence. “They’re even better than I remembered.”

Steve’s eyes shine up a little at that. Bucky guesses it’s more because of the suggestion that he had memories of them than at the complement. The silence turns – not uncomfortable, but heavier.

“I miss you, Buck.” Steve smiles, but it’s only a mask for the deeper sadness beneath it. “Feels like I miss you more now than when you were gone.”

“I know, pal.” Bucky squeezes his fists tight inside his pockets. Not for the first time, he wishes he were well enough to touch him without having to worry about the psychological consequences. “I miss you too. Every damn day.”

Steve stares down at his unfinished drawing, lips pressed tight together.

Bucky knows what he wants to say. But he won’t say it. Steve knows full well why it has to be this way. As painful as it is, it’s also a relief, in a shameful sort of way.  

 

Bucky gets up. He sees Steve tense up to keep himself from turning toward him, from reaching out, from watching him walk away again.

Bucky pulls the gift out of his pocket and lays it on the table, next to Steve’s sketchpad. It’s a postcard with an illustration of the Met on the front, but the real special part is on the back. There, Bucky’s carefully printed the address to a P.O. box on it in his shaky handwriting. He walks away, but looks back over his shoulder before he rounds a curve in the path.

Steve has the postcard in one hand, and the other has its fingers pressed up against his mouth. He’s looking at the back.

Bucky turns out of his sight line before he looks up.

 

A week later he gets a postcard back.

There’s a round painting on the front, all gathered shards in bluish hues, bisected occasionally by striking yellow. It looks like a stained glass window, or like looking down into a blue gemstone, the kaleidoscope of facets shining out from within. Bucky wonders if he’d seen it on his trip to the museum; there’s something familiar about it in a way he can’t place.

On the back, there’s no words where there usually are. Instead the space is filled with a pencil drawing of two young men, arms slung around each other’s shoulders. One is skinny and the other is wiry but broad, and both are smiling like they’re exactly where they should be. Bucky doesn’t quite know how he can tell, but he’s certain that it’s drawn from memory.

Very small at the bottom, in perfect cursive, it says: _Wish you were here!_

In the upper left corner, very small, is a description of the image on the front:

Joseph Stella | [ _Coney Island_](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/489305)[, 1914](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/489305).

His heart stutters. Bucky looks at the drawing again and this time notices that the left hand of the taller figure is gently shaded and segmented into moving parts, with as much care as the rest of the figure’s features.

He smiles, and thinks _someday_ comes a little closer.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written between the events of Winter Soldier and Civil War, this story could take place there – though it's probably vague enough to happen any time you feel it could. I found this in my drafts from, like, three years ago. I read it and realized it was just about finished enough to publish, and then wondered why I never actually put it up. So...here. 
> 
> This story was inspired by a trip of my own to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and almost all the linked works were actually on display at the time of my visit. Most are part of the permanent collection, so go say hi if you ever wind up in NYC.


End file.
